Improvisations of Empire: Thomas Pringle in Scotland, the Cape Colony and London, 1789–1834 by Matthew Shum (review)

Thomas Pringle (1789–1834) made what was probably the most significant decision of his life in deciding to join the settlers emigrating to the Cape Colony in 1820. His early life had begun modestly on a farm in rural Roxburghshire amidst pastoral and secluded scenery. Although the young man rode to school on horseback, it seems that he was lame from an early age. Josiah Condor, his first biographer, remarks in his Biographical Sketch that his incurable lameness caused Pringle much suffering and made it seem unlikely that he would become a traveller to distant lands.¹ Yet he did become a traveler to the remote eastern province of the Cape colony on the southern tip of Africa. His lameness also had one good result: as he could not work on the land, like his siblings, he went instead to grammar school and then eventually to Edinburgh University to study classics. However, the precocious Pringle was already writing verse and more interested in literature than in the ancient languages. He formed a literary club and his circle included John Fairbairn, someone who was to figure again in his Cape Town days. Instead of a career in the professions, Pringle entered the frenetic world of journalism, first with the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (later called Blackwood’s) and then the Edinburgh Magazine. Unfortunately, he managed to make enemies of several influential publishers so that his career as a writer was virtually over by the time the announcement was made about the proposed settlement in the Albany district of the Eastern Cape. By this time Pringle had made various South African contacts through Alexander Waugh, one of the founders of the London Missionary Society and knew of their work, particularly that of Dr John Philip. Pringle’s financial situation, without a stable job, was precarious. The advertisement for the settlers’ scheme, painting the Cape as a terrestrial paradise, no doubt influenced by William Burchell’s testimony to a House of Commons Committee inquiring into the matter, was tempting. Pringle and other members of his family set off for the distant colony.

Matthew Shum begins his book, well-researched but overladen with references, on the links between Pringle’s Scottish writing and that of his time in South Africa, much of which was written in London after his return to Britain in 1826. He begins by labelling Pringle as a “minor Scottish poet” (10) who is already writing in the British imperial tradition, setting aside indigenous Scottish culture exemplified in the verse of “Rabbie” Burns. Pringle’s latent colonialism is most apparent in his attitude to the gypsies, “vagrant hordes” (24) who have failed to adapt to European culture. The background to this thinking is the “four stages theory” enunciated by eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers whereby society progresses from a state of savagery to that of commercial politeness. Some sections of society—such as the gypsies and the Scottish Highlanders—contribute nothing to this progress, a view that could be applied, in the colonial setting, to the indigenous peoples of the Cape. At the same time, Shum is also keen to show that Pringle was class-conscious, having a low opinion of the British laborers and artisans who were also emigrants to the Albany settlement.

Shum’s revisionist mission now becomes clear. He intends to demolish Pringle’s reputation as a liberal humanitarian, presented by writers like Randolph Vigne, whose biography he dismisses on the grounds that it is too laudatory, and Timothy Keegan, who puts Pringle in the pantheon of liberal heroes.² In a very revealing moment, Shum says that his intention “is not to expose him [Pringle] as a hypocrite or to question the sincerity of his later humanitarian claims” (52). But that is exactly what he does. In the second section of his book we have arrived in the Cape: Shum concentrates on a detailed analysis of Pringle’s...